Hostile enemy imagery in expellee politics faded as Cold War tensions eased.
Evidence
During the ‘hot period’ of the Cold War in the 1950s, negative images of Eastern European governments and peoples were very common in West Germany. Within the interior communications of the expellee organizations, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II was often compared to very remote wars and invasions. In the case of the Hungarians, historians made allusion to the Huns. For many Sudeten German expellee politicians, their group had been expelled from Czechoslovakia as a consequence of the Czech Hussite tradition. These interpretations delivered collective characterologies often adopted from the mental world of pan-German nationalism or Nazi ideology. … When the hot period of the Cold War started to cool down as a result of détente policies from the mid-1960s, these racial and ethnic interpretations became less important. — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 916
Categorization
- XREF: Directly speaks to the reader’s research question on whether group solidarity depends on an external enemy that decays when the threat resolves. — connects to: Electoral competition over expellee voters locked parties into rigid Cold War stances. — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 171; Arab political solidarity dissolved once cold war patrons and external enemies receded. — Youssef Cherif, Neo-pan-Arabism: a renewed contract of…, 39; Expellee political power eroded once generational change and border settlement removed grievances — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 403 (+2 more)
- SEED: Contrast expellee organizations’ manufactured-Slav-enemy rhetoric cooling in the 1960s with other solidarity groups that manufactured replacement enemies when their original threat vanished.
Broader Connections
- Cold War refugee quotas collapsed once anti-communist imperatives ended
#corroborates(0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3870 - Expellee organizations crystallized anti-reunification-compromise principles during Cold War polarization.
#corroborates(0.75) — Pertti Ahonen, Domestic Constraints on West German…, 29